


Encounters

by kazmir



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Han Heavy, M/M, Mando Light, Post-Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Pre-Episode: s01e01 The Mandalorian, Pre-Relationship, Rare Pairings, Romantic or platonic, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:34:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27828340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kazmir/pseuds/kazmir
Summary: A nightclub, a shootout, a conquest, a throne room.A series of short encounters between the galaxy's most infamous smuggler and some guy in a beskar mask.
Relationships: Chewbacca & Han Solo, Din Djarin/Han Solo
Comments: 8
Kudos: 88





	Encounters

**Author's Note:**

> This is rough. I haven't written anything in years and it shows. What I ended up with is a sorta disconnected look at a post-ROTJ Han Solo trying his best to make bad decisions, with some soulmark nonsense floating around in the background. Read it as romantic or read it as platonic. Whatever floats your spaceboat, y'all.
> 
> Enjoy.
> 
> -

It’s not his usual scene, this club. It is, however, one of the few places left in this sector willing to let him in the door long enough to take all his credits. He’d take a dusty cantina on some backwater scug-hole any day over this kind of joint, with its strobing lights and pounding bass lines rocking the crowded dance floors on the levels below. 

Still, he supposes, the whiskey goes down the same no matter where it’s poured. A few drinks ago, the bartender had up and left the bottle, tired of standing by while Han had fumbled through his trouser pockets for credits.

There’s an itch under his skin now, like his body’s game for a fight his muddied, fuddled brain knows it possibly can’t win but still maybe wants to give it a shot. It’s why, when someone jostles him up against the packed bar and nearly knocks him off his stool, he feels totally, utterly justified in running his mouth.

The taste of something rude and nasty is flooding his mouth – well, and it’s also probably bile – and he spins on his stool to give this guy a piece of his mind, and then he freezes. His limbs, gone loose over the course of the night from the drink, all start to seize up in degrees.

Han blinks hard, like it’ll clear the apparition in front of him. Blinks again, and sees the slow, stupid unshuttering of his bloodshot eyes in the reflection of a very shiny, very familiar piece of polished metal.

“Son of a bitch. A Mandalorian,” he says. Well, slurs. “That’s what you are, right? A Mandalorian? A real Mandalorian? Hope you ain’t here for me, or you’re gonna have a real bad night, pal. ‘Cos I don’t know if you’ve heard the stories, but the last one of your kind I came across, I kicked into a sarlaac pit. _Well_ , shoved. _Well_ , pushed. Okay, bumped. Doesn’t matter. Anyway. Here’s a thousand years of torturous agony.”

He holds his bottle up in a pantomime of a salute, flinching not even at all as that helmet slowly turns his way. Pulls down a hard swallow that burns deep in his chest, that burns all the way down. 

He watches as explosions of strobing light flood the dead-black, t-shaped visor, the flicker of bright-dark-bright on the mismatched panels of armor encasing the stiffened body that’s now shifted in his direction.

If the Mandalorian has anything to say, Han doesn’t get a chance to hear it. 

Two big paws come up under his arms, then, and drag him bodily off his stool. The world lurches sideways in a roiling, nauseating wave. His vision narrows to a tunnel then a point, a small little pinprick of light where the only thing that exists is that deathmask of a helmet staring back at him as he’s dragged out into the night.

*

Fifteen hours in hyperspace have distanced them from the pleasure planet, and Han finally drags himself out of his bunk and into the cockpit. His co-pilot is in heavy goggles and soldering something near the navi-computer panel, small showers of sparks spitting softly then fading away.

“ _You look terrible_ ,” Chewie says without even looking.

“I feel terrible,” Han says.

“ _You smell terrible_ ,” Chewie says.

“You smell terrible,” Han says. He sips miserably at his cup of instant caf and tries very hard not to look at the swirling smudge of stars beyond the glass.

*

“No, no, no!” Han shouts over the cacophony of blaster and slug fire. “ _You_ come to _me_!”

Chewie shakes his head and points to the bolt graze on his upper arm, which is really just a little scorched fur and nothing much else. Then he points to his bandolier, which is laying in a heap pretty much equal distance between them.

Han groans. He loves a good shootout as much as the next guy, but it hits different when it’s one he’s an active participant in than when it’s one he’d walked into on accident. 

This one, well, it’s definitely the latter. Territory dispute, he guesses, or just plain boredom. This garbage heap of a moon’s about as quiet as they come, most days. It’s what had drawn him here to begin with, eager to shed some heat they’d attracted over a less than elegant cargo run down the Hydian for a couple of wannabe gangsters biting off more than they could chew.

What’s that saying, though? You are the company you keep and all that.

He slips his blaster from his holster again, checks the power cell, then peeks his head around the heap of boxes he’d taken cover behind when this whole thing kicked off. 

It’s a haul to the _Millennium Falcon_ , just a quarter mile of flat open plains and no real cover. They could wait it out ‘til nightfall, low crawl it through the short grass if Chewie’s not feeling too prissy from his scratch. Or they could double back to the village, maybe, but he keeps hearing potshots and repeater rifle fire coming from that direction, so things aren’t looking much better on that front either.

Yeah, they’re pinned.

There’s a lull in fire on the landing pad and Han risks another glance. He can see movement behind some of the cargo littered around the duracrete, and it’s spooky stuff for sure, but it might be the best chance he’s got to get to Chewie. 

Han snaps his fingers to draw his co-pilot’s attention. “Cover me,” he mouths, waits for Chewie to nod in response and lumber into a more defensive position. 

He sprints.

It’s pretty immediate, the way he draws all of the fire all at once. He snatches up the bandolier and starts firing wildly in all the directions as he runs full tilt towards Chewie’s cover. Chewie is leveling off bolt after bolt downrange, scratch or no scratch, and Han almost makes it. 

He really almost does.

Whatever hits him feels like a fist, as if someone’d balled up their hand and punched it straight through his sternum. It knocks him right off his feet and right on his back, steals all his breath and spreads fire across his chest, down his flank. Han’s not sure if he’s ever felt pain like this before.

Chips of duracrete rain down around him, and he’s dully aware that Chewie is shouting at him, but the blood rushing in his ears makes everything else sound like it’s underwater, like he’s hearing it from far away through wads of balled up cotton.

It doesn’t really compute when Chewie drags him by his ankle to cover, because he can’t focus on much else except the cracked open feeling deep in his breast.

He looks up at the sky, the cloudless blue bruising purple as the night starts to inch in. Cold is spreading and he shivers, but there’s a spreading warmth, too, and he’s aware in that disconnected and far-removed way that it’s his blood leaving his body.

“ _It’s okay_ ,” Chewie says, pressing a big paw down on the center of him.

“It’s okay,” Han says, even though it’s not.

He looks up into all that purple with its black creeping in around the edges, and Han is conscious just long enough to watch a _Razor Crest_ ship rip apart the skies above him.

*

“ _It doesn’t look that bad_ ,” Chewie says.

Han looks down at himself and scowls. The bacta’s done its job, but only just. His chest and belly are one big bruise, the colors of a terrestrial sunset – all purples and blues and blacks. Between his pecs and center mass is a long and ragged scar where his co-pilot had strong-armed a med droid into digging around for the slug and stitching him up.

He doesn’t remember that, or being shot with a slugthrower, or being on the moon at all. The med droid says he’d been wracked with fever and infection by the time the _Falcon_ had docked at the space station, but the pain killers Han’s been on have had him flying high for days, so the memory problem might be that a little bit, too. 

“I’ve heard from many a pilot,” says the med droid solemnly, “that beings of the female persuasion like scars.”

Han about laughs ‘til he pukes.

*

It’s a bad idea and he knows it. 

The rendezvous time with the representative for their newest client is only a few standard hours away. The job’s big and it pays big, too. If they woo this guy right, it could make a lot of problems go away for Han and Chewie both, could even build back some of the respect and reputation they’d lost during their little sabbatical with the New Republic. 

But Han is, after all, only a man. 

So when the female Togruta and male Zeltron couple catch his eye in the dumpling shop he’s killing time in, when they beckon him over for a cup of tea and a couple frankly kind of gross food-related innuendos, of course he goes home with them. Of course he does. It’s only polite.

They take him to a large suite in one of the nicest hotels this side of the ecumenopolis, so high up that Han can’t see the ground through the nighttime mist rolling in from the ocean. The transparisteel window is a cool balm on his feverish skin, and it fogs up as he pants against it, squeaks as his fingers scrabble for hold on the smooth, cold surface.

The Zeltron keeps him pinned to the glass, the Togruta moving about the darkened room like a ghostly predator, and Han’s never felt so much like prey in his life, never felt so caged in. That bizarre unity of pleasure and discomfort is not some new thing for him, but he’s never felt so observed.

After, the Togruta and the Zeltron curl up in bed and drop into sleep. Han gathers up his clothes and slips into the ‘fresher, aware of the time now that his brain has come back online.

He’s pretty much put together and swishing water around his mouth when the ‘fresher door slides open with a _swoosh_. It’s the Togruta, and she’s rubbing at her eyes a little blearily under the bright lights.

“Sorry,” Han says, “was I too loud?”

“Not at all,” she says in a quiet voice, then gestures vaguely to her montrals. “I could feel you moving.”

She moves to him then, not stalking him as she had earlier, but in a way that feels almost placating. He watches only a little bit warily as she places her hands on his chest, tugging with a single finger at the vee of his gaped-open tunic. 

There’s a spike of something in his blood, interest definitely part of it, but his body is shot out and aching and no longer twenty. Han catches her wrists in his grip before she can rid him of his shirt.

The Togruta is phased not at all, and she nods her head towards his chest, where the bruising has faded to an ugly amalgamation of greens and yellows, bisected by the jagged scar. “What is that?”

“Slug scar,” Han says.

“No, not that,” she says. “ _That_.”

She slides one hand from his grasp and runs the tip of her finger in a tight semicircle around the bottom of the scar. He can’t stop the shiver when her touch catches softly on the pocked, puckered tissue. 

Han tries to look down, but he can’t see much of anything from this angle. He moves to the vanity and pulls the hand mirror from the wall. It’s – he’s not sure what he’s looking at, not at first anyway, but he’s vain enough to have looked at the ruined flesh enough to know it looks off.

The mark is red and still shiny, not inflamed, but there’s something else, like black swoops under his skin. Maybe they’re stitches left in and grown over, his body finally rejecting them out. Maybe it’s some sort of weird space infection, or a latent reaction to the (expired) bacta treatments he’d received.

“It’s Aurebesh,” says the Togruta.

“I don’t have tattoos,” says Han, but if he looks a little closer he can make out a character or two, an _E_ maybe, an _L_. The rest is lost in the stiffened, reddened flesh, just whorls of illegible black.

She shrugs and says, “Didn’t say it was.”

*

“ _You’re late_ ,” Chewie says, his growls crackling over the communicator. “ _Are you lost_?”

“No, I’m not lost,” Han says, lost.

“ _You’re late because you’re lost_.”

“I got caught up in something. Tell the guy I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“ _He’s not here yet_.”

Han stares down at the communicator before responding, “Then what the hell are you giving me grief for?”

*

The drop point’s on Isla, a tiny water moon he’d never heard of, orbiting a gas giant spinning off the Corellian spire.

After the battle of Jakku and the fall of the Empire, a lot of the old Imperial strongholds and stomping grounds had vehemently resisted control under the New Republic, distrustful of an organization coming in to establish some unified galactic-wide order.

Isla had resisted, and with enough violence that the New Republic had drawn up stakes and slunk off back to the Hosnian systems to lick their wounds. 

Isla wouldn’t go ungoverned for long, though, not with its clean clear oceans teeming with fish, the precious mineral deposits deep under the ocean’s crust. The new syndicate Han had thrown in with had gotten their hooks in early and had the small moon under command in less than a month.

And the syndicate may be running things happily, but the people under its thumb look anything but. They may not be sick or starving or enslaved, but they’re subjugated all the same, just as they’d been under the heavy fist of the Empire.

Han tries not to think about, but yeah, he’s a piece of garbage for this job.

The guilt’s not as much a moral deterrent as it should be. His debts hadn’t dissolved with the dissolution of the Empire, and a peacetime general’s pay hadn’t come close to cutting down those dues.

Still, the undercurrent of tension on Isla is impossible to ignore, not quite a razor’s edge, but sharp enough that he takes notice as he waits at the beachfront cantina for his contact. Sharp enough that he wishes he’d brought Chewie along for the meet, just had him fix that O2 circulator in orbit somehow.

He's nursing a whiskey out on the lanai when he hears it, an abrupt _thwap_ high in the atmosphere.

Then, a sudden and startling absence of sound.

Han knows what he’ll find when he looks up at the sky, knows that _thwap_ , dreams about it sometimes, but the glass still nearly tumbles out of his grasp when he sees.

The star destroyer cuts in front of the sun like the blade of a knife, casting shadow over everything below, and Han’s got his hand wrapped around his communicator before he even realizes he’s moved.

“Chewie, I sure hope that O2 problem is fixed,” he says, voice steady in a way that betrays the tremor in his hand, the cool sweat that’s broken out across his skin, the quick-time thud deep in his chest, because he’s pretty sure they’d killed these guys and yet here they kriffin’ are.

“ _Working on it_.”

“Yeah? Work faster, pal,” Han urges, working his way through the cantina and out into the street.

By now, masses of people have flooded the streets to point up at the Imperial ship or run to their homes for shelter, as if mudbrick and driftwood would hold up any against Kuat-constructed laser cannon fire.

Han shoulders his way through the swelling crowds to an alley he knows, or hopes, opens out onto another thoroughfare skirting the outermost fence of the landing pad. It’s slow-going, moving against the grain like this, but he pushes hard until he spills into the mouth of the short, narrow walkway. 

There are others shoving their way down the cramped path, knocking down bins and running through clotheslines that droop haphazardly from window to window. It’s sheer and utter panic, chaos.

He’s near the exit when a door swings open in his path. He gets his hands up fast enough to keep it from slamming into his face, but the force of it almost knocks him on his ass, would have if not for an arm wrapping its way around his waist, hauling him up on his feet.

The arm drops as soon as it’d grabbed him. 

Han spins on his heels, hands clenched up and raised in defense, and finds himself face to face with a shining Beskar helmet.

He’s seen this guy before, he realizes. Knows with a fierce surety he feels to his core, burning at the center of him and spreading outward, curdling around the fight-or-flight instinct that’s blazing a path through his body, seizing his muscle.

The club on the pleasure planet, half a bottle deep. _Here’s to a thousand years of torturous agony._

The Mandalorian reaches for one of his curled fists, and Han watches as a gloved hand encircles his wrist, orange leather on his bare skin. The guy, who is a stranger but also somehow isn’t, lugs him to the side, out of the way of the panicked jostle of the crowd. And Han just lets him, the fight leaving his body in one swift whoosh and not knowing why.

“I know you,” Han says.

The Mandalorian’s grip tightens on his wrist before letting go completely, and he seems to nod, an almost imperceptible tilt. In a modulated voice, he says, “Listen.”

And it’s faint, but it’s there, a still distant but gaining scream-whirr of countless aircraft moving low and moving fast, splitting the lower atmosphere at a few hundred miles an hour. 

The situation, it seems, has just gone from bad to worse.

“TIEs,” Han grits.

“TIEs,” the Mandalorian says.

“My ship’s nearby,” Han says.

“So is mine.”

“Guess we’ll see,” Han says, pulling his blaster from his holster, “after you.”

There’s a tug in his chest, below his scar and beyond bone deep. Han rubs at it absently as he follows the Mandalorian out into the fray.

*

The adrenaline’s still burning hot in his veins by the time Han and Chewie hit hyperspace, and his hands tremble with it as he pulls up his communicator. 

It’s not a call he wants to make, doesn’t even know if it’ll get picked up on the other end. A bitter, aching part of him almost hopes it doesn’t. But if the shredded remnants of the Empire would dare hit so close to the Core, that’s a big problem. Someone big needs to know, and fast.

Body wound tight, he tries to settle into his chair while he waits for the ping of connection through the warble of a searching signal, scrubbing at the ash on his temple, pinching the bridge of his nose between two cold fingers.

He doesn’t wait for long, and the call engages with a crackling hiss.

“ _Han_.”

“Leia.”

*

Klatooine is about as far into Hutt space Han’s willing to go.

Jabba’s family is still a little sore over the Tatooine incident a few years back, and time hasn’t quite healed those wounds. But that old slug had made enemies even along his own bloodline on his slither to the top, so there are certain scummier factions among the Hutts willing to overlook Han’s hand in Jabba’s early demise for the right kind of service.

Like attracts like, after all. Han is scum, too.

Still, there are certain lines he won’t cross, won’t bear witness to.

This is why, when a line of humanoids is dragged before the elevated throne by one long rattling chain, Han shifts to Chewie and tells him from the side of his mouth that it’s time to go.

The throne room is rocking with jeers and leery shouts, credits flying as the Zabrak auctioneer starts making his way down the chain, rattling off numbers into the unruly crowd. 

Han’s already turned away and scoping out the exit when the cheering escalates, really reaches a fever pitch. Chewie tugs on his sleeve, brings him back around, and Han’s stomach drops hard and fast as someone else is dragged out and thrown down in front of the throne.

It’s the Mandalorian.

His hands are bound before him with thick fibrous rope, a thick metal band hanging from his neck in the space where his Beskar helmet meets his durasteel chest plate. When he pulls himself to his feet, he’s favoring one side, and Han can see even from some distance away that his flight suit is stained with dark, tacky blood.

The guard who’d hauled him in hands something off to the auctioneer. The Zabrak turns back to the crowd with a flourish and holds out the device, then depresses a button in the center of the control. 

The sound of the charge is like a cracking whip, and the Mandalorian seizes, falls hard to all fours as blue and white electricity dances across the surface of the metal band at his throat. 

The Hutts and their audience roar with laughter.

Han feels sick.

“Our finest catch!” the Zabrak shouts. “A Mandalorian!”

“How much?” someone calls out from the audience chamber.

The Zabrak turns to the Hutts up on the throne, then nods as they prattle off something in Huttese. The auctioneer says to the crowd, “A true Mandalorian is rare, indeed. Rarer even than the Beskar it covers itself with.”

“I’ll buy the Beskar!” shouts some Devaronian close to the platform.

The Zabrak bows to the Devaronian but shakes his head. “A Mandalorian must not be parted from its armor. It is forbidden by Code, so I have been told. Of course, what its buyer should do after the price is paid…well, that is one’s business.”

Someone else: “It must be ugly under there. Maybe it’s a Devaronian.”

The crowd stomps their feet with laughter. Han watches as the Mandalorian gathers himself back up, staring out into the throngs of beings with that blank, still mask. Stoic almost, but Han can see the rapid rise and fall of his chest beneath the durasteel armor.

“I start the bid at 15,000!” the Zabrak cries out.

When bids have ballooned to 37,000, Han decides to do something stupid, which is honestly just keeping with his character and shouldn’t be surprising in the least, but Chewie still groans like it is.

“75,000!” Han shouts, wincing even as he says it. “75,000.”

The Zabrak whips around, eyes wide, and the Hutts on the throne smack their tails against the platform for silence. Han grits his teeth as all eyes land on him. Even the Mandalorian’s empty, black visor has turned up at him. Han stands taller, trying to ignore the heat building under his collar.

The Hutts bark something at the auctioneer.

“Mr. Solo?” asks the Zabrak.

Han juts his chin out a little haughtily, tucking his thumbs into his holster. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“We will accept your bid, Mr. Solo,” the auctioneer says diplomatically, “but we must insist we see the money first.”

The crowd erupts in a new wave of laughter. 

Chewie, the traitor, joins them.

*

“Be careful with that one. He’ll break your nose with that damn helmet of his,” the auctioneer says flatly.

Away from the throne room, the theatrical flourish in the Zabrak’s voice is gone. He recounts the credits mechanically, then nods to the guard, who hands Han the controller. 

Another guard shoves the Mandalorian forward, and Han can see the rage brimming in the way he’s holding his body so tight, the way his fists are curling and uncurling beneath the thick ropes binding his arms together.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Han says congenially, forcing a smile.

*

“Can you hold still, please?”

He pulls the sonic cutters away from the metal band just as another tremor wracks the Mandalorian’s body. An aftershock effect from the electric current that’d put him on knees in the throne room, if Han had to guess.

“How did they get you anyway?” he asks. “Thought your kind were the best in the galaxy. Kinda, uh, odd you got lassoed in by some small-timers like that.”

“It – I was on a job.”

“A bounty.”

The Mandalorian breathes out. “A bounty.”

“You Guild?”

“Yes.”

Han nods, moving back in with the tool once the shuddering finally passes. “Huh. Hey. There a bounty on my head, Mandalorian?”

“There’s _always_ a bounty on your head, Solo.”

Han preens a little at that, even though he really shouldn’t. Who’s to say this chrome dome won’t turn on him and turn him for a payout in the second he snips the shock collar off? He doesn’t think he will, just a feeling deep in his center, but Han’s never been known for his good judge of character. 

Or his common sense, for that matter. Because he’s about six inches away from a guy that could lay him out flat with probably minimal effort, close enough to feel the heat of his skin even through the thick collar of his flight suit, far enough away from the shock controller that Han wouldn’t stand a chance before he hit the deck.

“There were slavers there,” the Mandalorian says after a moment, then adds, “slavers in the town where my quarry was last seen. They were taking the kids. Throwing them in cages, loading them onto shuttles. I – ”

It’s hard to tell through the modulator flattening his voice, but he sounds upset.

Han goes still, his fingers curled under the band and pressed up against bone. There’s a tic there, so faint and so deep, that he wonders if it’s the Mandalorian’s heartbeat quickening, or if it’s his own.

“There were too many of them. The slavers. The kids. But I tried,” the Mandalorian finishes.

Han’s not even sure what to say to that. What would he even say? He suspects there’s a lot more to the story than the guy’s letting on, but who the hell would want to talk about it anyway. They lapse into silence as Han works at the band. 

Eventually, it comes apart in his hands, though it drags at the material of the Mandalorian’s suit collar. The fabric there is fused to the metal, burned through to the skin. Even in the ship’s low lights, he can see reddened blistered flesh.

“This got you good,” Han says. “I’ll get the med kit.”

“It’s fine,” the Mandalorian says, but the way he flinches when Han tugs the metal band free from his flight suit says otherwise.

“I’ll get the med kit,” Han repeats firmly.

He’s mildly surprised to see the bounty hunter still seated at the dejarik table when he returns from the cockpit, med kit in hand. He takes a seat next to him again and rifles through the box for a sanitizing wipe and a bacta patch. Pretty much everything’s expired, but Han reckons it’s better than nothing and says as much.

The Mandalorian holds out his gloved hand. “I can do it.”

“I don’t mind,” Han says simply, moving in with the wipe in hand.

Before he can get any closer, his wrist is caught in a bruising grip, the small bones shifting under the pressure. He rears back with a glare, and spits out, “Hey pal, what’s your deal?”

“I – ” the Mandalorian starts, then stops just as suddenly.

“I’m not touching your,” Han waves a vague hand at his helmet, “thing. ‘Sides, if you are a Devaronian under there, I can’t say I blame you for keeping it on.”

The Mandalorian breathes out what sounds suspiciously like a laugh, audible but distorted through the mod. It’s weird. But good? But mostly weird.

The helmet tips away and to the side, baring the ruined patch of his neck, and Han figures that’s as much of a concession he’s gonna get with this guy. Human, Han realizes, as he pulls gently at the collar of his suit. 

It’s a mess of blistering flesh, crimson and inflamed. Nothing a bacta patch and a couple hours can’t fix, but it looks like hell. Probably feels like it, too. He moves the sanitizer across his skin methodically, carefully, but frowns when the towelette doesn’t debride the blackened flesh or fibers from the wound. 

Han scrubs with just a bit more effort but pulls back when he hears an intake of breath, feels the Mandalorian’s hand clench up where it rests between them on the seat.

“It’s your suit, I think,” Han says, still frowning.

“It’s not,” the Mandalorian says. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not that.”

Han looks closer, feeling emboldened enough, or perhaps stupid enough, to move the bounty hunter’s collar down just an inch or two. He tilts his head to the side.

“It’s words,” Han says.

“It showed up one morning. You said them a week later,” the Mandalorian says. “I think they’re your words.”

“Huh,” Han says, and reads aloud what he sees. “ _Son of a bitch. A Mandalorian_. This is, wow, it’s – it’s everything I said to you that night?”

“Yes.”

A bubble of laughter bursts out of him, and then, “That junk about a sarlaac pit? Is that – that’s there, too?”

The Mandalorian’s visor pins him with a stare.

Han laughs again, unbidden this time, until his chest gets so tight that the scar starts to ache.

*

The bounty hunter’s ship – a _Razor Crest_ , a real fossil, and something Han’s maybe seen a dream – is on a real cold ice hole far out on the Rim.

It’s where his quarry had gone to ground.

It’s also where he’d been picked off by slavers.

“We’ll stick around,” Han says, as he lowers the ramp onto the ice.

“Not necessary,” the Mandalorian says, then tugs a tracking fob off his belt and stares down at the blinking indicator.

“ _Tell him it’s chivalrous_ ,” Chewie calls out from the cockpit. “ _Tell him you’re a gentleman_.”

“Tell your friend I speak Shyriiwook.”

Han feels heat flood his face, but he smirks to hide it. “Do you speak Shyriiwook?”

“I might,” and then, “I owe you 75,000.”

“You might,” and then, “I think we’ll run into each other again.”


End file.
